La Cienega Area

Painter Adam Bricusse says he was attracted to whales first because of the formal properties of a graceful object moving through water and, second, because of conservationists’ objections to hunting intelligent, peaceable mammals for profit. He came up with an interesting solution for representing a deep perspectival space that is filled with a moving, light-attracting and light-emitting substance. To get the sense of a churning, mysterious ocean, Bricusse first covers large canvases with transparent washes of turquoise and deep blues, then covers these while they are still wet with successive, thin layers of varnish to re-create water’s enigmatic qualities of light, motion and depth. He falls short of capturing some sense of the animal’s majesty and ecological predicament, however.

Only a few glossy blue paintings of acrobatic ebony masses gliding through limpid depths or piercing the water’s surface transmit any sense of poignant heroism--despite added images of Napoleonic soldiers, as if to remind us that we’re waging war on animals that have no natural predators other than man.

The high point in this show of huge canvases and bigger-than-life subject matter comes in a quiet wall of tiny collages in which Bricusse embeds photos and text into watery blue washes. A tiny snapshot of a dozen turn-of-the-century fishermen lined up proudly on the body of a dead whale, a fashion shot of a woman carefully applying lipstick (made from whale fat) and phrases giving an anthology of inane commercial uses for whale parts all collide in the small works to make Bricusse’s point admirably. (Caz Gallery, 8715 Melrose Ave. to Jan. 20.)